One thing i'm sick of hearing is that one quote by Benjamin Franklin -- you know the one, the one that every conservative is trotting out these days -- not just my buddy here. The one that goes...
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Oh, snap! Case closed. Governments should not be monitoring calls, nor searching people at airports, nor monitoring people in any way. Because that takes away from freedom and adds to safety, and that's wrong. It's wrong because Ben Franklin said so! Everything that Ben Franklin ever said is automatically law, because he was the smartest and wisest person who ever lived.
Okay. I can live with that.
Dismantle the NSA.
But we have to follow Franklin's other quotes as well. If you want to make Ben Franklin the sole arbiter of right and wrong in our country, i'm cool with that, i really am. It's just too bad that when George Bush was fluffing the American populace for war with Iraq, no one stood up and pointed out that Franklin once said the following...
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones.
Boom! Sorry, Bush. No war for you. It goes against the holy way of Franklin. As for Christianity?
We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God,
made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from
heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be
changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see
us happy.
You hear that, you superstitious motherfuckers? The Bible is a fiction; Franklin says that only science matters -- the water cycle is superior to the mythic fables of Jebus. That's just how it is. And let's end with...
He does not possess wealth; it possesses him.
See that? Accumulated wealth is bad. Franklin says so. That does it; we must relieve the wealthy of their ill-gotten fortunes that possess them, and distribute them for the common weal. It is the only way, the way of Franklin.
Franklin. His word. Is Law.
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2 comments:
You're again conflating the actual conservatives with the CINOs.
And no one said we should treat Franklin's word as law, its merely a warning we should keep in mind every once in a while.
Actually, in regards to our Founding Fathers, I take more inspiration from Thomas Jefferson:
"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
And over the past twenty to thirty years, we have seen a government that has bloated to such a degree that the people have no control over. Its how Bush got Iraq and the Patriot Act, its how Obama is giving the NSA and God knows who else the permission to spy on us. Both men have contributed to the degradation of our Constitution, and the end result if nothing is done is a government without checks. Ask yourself, do you truly feel free in the times we live in right now?
(In non-political relatedness, have you seen Man of Steel yet?)
(No, sure haven't. With my weird night schedule, the only way i can see a movie in the theater is to leave as soon as i wake up, and leave three sad-faced dogs to whine after me for three hours. It's hard to do.)
You know, i do feel remarkably free. For all the talk of being enslaved, i can't think of a single time in my life when the government has ever halted my actions. I spend my time working a job that i want to work, and do freelance art on top of that. Whatever i want, whenever i want. No one ever tells me what to do. I can access all the info i want, see any movie or hear any music i want, and could get drugs fairly easily (if i wanted them.)
I feel pretty dang free.
You know what would make me feel NOT free? The draft. Think on that -- conservatives today like to claim that the last 30 years have been some kind of march into enslavement, but that's been one of the few times when we've been free of the draft.
My father volunteered to fight in Korea before he was drafted; he had no real choice either way. The government said to him, and the other young men of his generation, you MUST join the army and fight whether you want to or not. You might die or be maimed, but who cares, right? We, the US government, own your life.
That won't happen to me. I think i'm more free than the last 10 generations of my family in that regard.
(By the way, did you get here from my DeviantArt page?)
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